Pyrrhic Humor

New York City's famed Park Commissioner Robert Moses does not like criticism. Like his boss, Fiorello LaGuardia, he has been long in office, is conscious that he has served the public well, is self-righteous, cantankerous, and never admits that he is mistaken. Like other cantankerously honest men, he enjoys being rude.

Last week Mrs. Zorah White Gristede, slim, attractive wife of an executive of the swank Gristede grocery chain, wrote the Commissioner a letter: "Concerning the children's 'playground' at Eighty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue--it's filthy, in truth more 'pen' than park and fit only for use of pigs. . . . Having seen the scrupulously clean parks of other nations of the world, maintained at a fraction of the cost of ours, I say with authority that Central Park, in toto, is a disgrace. . . ."

Commissioner Moses gave his one-sentence reply to the press before Mrs.,, Gristede received it: "If you like the foreign parks so much, why don't you patronize them?" Furious, Citizen Gristede led reporters to Central Park. A cameraman took a picture of a big rat foraging among the pigeons.

Meantime toplofty Commissioner Moses got himself into another row. He wrote another letter, this time in answer to the Hempstead (L.I.) Newsday, which had criticized him for denying soldiers free golf privileges at Bethpage State Park. Excerpt: "Experience has shown that most of the servicemen who play golf are officers, who can afford a reasonable fee, and that the average . . . doughboy regards golf as a sport of toffs* and gentlemen and doesn't know a divot from an Attic tomb inscription."

The New York Herald Tribune aptly commented: "A public official is always in danger from his own jokes, but the danger becomes acute when he begins to think that the worst of them are funny."

* Webster: toff, n. A dandy; swell. Brit. Slang.

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